Friday, September 10, 2004

Chris Lightfoot has done something quite interesting in his recent blog posting where he discusses the weirdness of crowds.

His post summarizes the results of his estimation quiz, where he asks questions like "What is the latitude of London?" asking for a value, and also, your estimate of the error in your answer. I'd recommend having a look at his results, it makes interesting reading...

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.